Gastronomic architecture: recipes for a new architectural cuisine

Studio: Fall 2016 - Spring 2017

First Reader: Cordula Roser Gray

Second Reader: Benjamin Smith, Ph.D.

Third Reader: Dr. Thomas Hebert

This thesis uses the language, structure, and visual strategy of the culinary arts as a vehicle for exploring the architecture of the current dining environment and as a tool for generating didactic new dining typologies.

INGREDIENT MATRIX

These ingredients are a distillation of current spatial conditions in five different restaurant typologies. The five typologies were decided based on the average amount of time a diner would spend within the establishment, both in ordering and eating a meal. The following notes the color assignments:

0-10 minutes, fast food, orange

10-30 minutes, fast casual, pink

30-60 minutes, casual fine, purple

60-90 minutes, fine, blue

90-120 minutes, Michelin starred, green

ENTREE DRAWINGS

The drawings combine multiple different ingredients from different restaurant typologies as well as categories for spatial analysis to create didactic new dining conditions. The typologies include a rural typology, a suburban typology, and an urban typology.

RURAL Typology

The rural typology combines inspiration from the highway driven culture associated with fast food, where people rarely leave their cars to eat and trucks line the highway filled with produce from across the country, with different seating and kitchen trends found in fast-casual, casual-fine, and fine dining settings. The trucks redefine “farm to table” dining by allowing the user to travel from farm to their destination while enjoying a meal.

SUBURBAN typology

This typology combines lessons from fast-casual dining with the more rigid spatial structure found in fine dining restaurants, which often have multiple rooms for diners. It reinterprets the structure of a multi course meal by creating different rooms for different entrees. Thresholds between each room allow the diner to create their own dining path, which can be adjusted based on cravings as well as the amount of time the diner has to enjoy their meals.

URBAN typology

The urban typology distills a chef ’s tasting menu into vertical structure, one that includes a floor for each process used to create a dish as well as individual dining rooms specifically curated to enhance the flavor of the dish. This structure is loosely based on six dishes from Massimo Bottura’s restaurant in Modena, Italy. The typology combines elements from the presentation and resources of fine dining with the context of fast casual and casual fine.